While every fashion house and fashion brand face different challenges, both share common marketing problems. Fortunately, Dreamweaver Brand Communications has solved five of the most complex fashion marketing problems.
1) Problem: You do not have a clearly defined fashion marketing plan
Dreamweaver Solution:
It is critical to embrace the notion of SMART goals. SMART stands for, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. To create an action orientated fashion marketing plan, start by surmising your goal – this helps bring you marketing game plan into focus.
The next step is to create a specific target or goal, those goals or targets could include a certain number of website visitors, a certain number of qualified leads per month, and so on. The next step in the SMART process is for your marketing leaders and team to set a deadline and allocate a set number of hours per day and week to your meet the marketing goals set. Lastly, explore and write down any obstacles your marketing team believes would inhibit meeting your SMART goals and find solutions around them.
2) Problem: Tough fashion marketing competition
Dreamweaver Solution:
Fashion and fashion marketing is a cut throat, but rewarding profession so build up your fashion ethos. For customers, both old and new, your ethos reflects your credibility – what is the quality of your work and how reliable you are. If you have not created areas of your website and your social media pages where potential customers can ask product related questions, current customers can leave feedback, ratings, testimonials and an area for customer service you must do so now. Customers are taking to social media in record numbers for customer service related issues, so it is critical that your social media marketing team be trained in customer service.
Close to all millennials rely on third-party recommendations or reviews from others who have worn the fashion garments. Many fashion clients turn to Dreamweaver Brand Communications to establish trust among clients and also corporate fashion buyers. We accomplish this through publishing guest posts on popular, high-ranking fashion industry blogs builds trust and bring more visitors to your website and store locations. Increasingly, our fashion clients utilize our fashion content marketing services and incorporate blogs with stunning visuals into their website to further enhance the customer experience, provide valuable information, and establish your fashion brand and lead designers as credible sources for all things fashion. Integrating a blog into your e-commerce fashion website also has tremendous SEO benefit for your site. Essentially, an integrated fashion marketing content plan piggybacks off of each reliable resource.
Many fashion brands and fashion designers are fantastic at creating stunning visual images but struggle crafting their written message and a call-to-action. Once the message is created and ready to send, it is important to use a CRM and other fashion marketing automation resources. These resources make each of your customers feel special that they are receiving individualized attention, care, and relevant content based on their like and interests.
Whether you’re at the corporate headquarters, a subsidiary of international business, or even a locally based business, there is one location that is your home base. Instagram for businesses is a fantastic avenue to incorporate the local community into your posts through city imagery or videos of your employees volunteering at a local charity. Don’t forget to use the right hashtag, so your images or videos get found easier and then shared throughout the greater Instagram community. Your Instagram page can strengthen relationships within the community and could also lead to new business and brand awareness organically with minimal effort. Overtime, it becomes less “me, me, me, and more “us, us, us.”
Fashion marketing is not an easy task; especially for both established and up and coming fashion brands and designers. That is why many fashion brands hire an integrated fashion marketing and fashion public relations agency to handle the fierce competition and let your brand focus on doing what you do best; fashion design!
3) Problem: Generating fashion leads
Dreamweaver Solution:
Create more conversion opportunities for fashion customers. Many fashion houses and fashion brands don’t use conversion opportunities such as “Learn More About the Tribeca Suit” or “Click Here to Find Your Size.” Typically, fashion houses and brands just use the name of the item, a picture of the item, and the price. Instead, you should create compelling calls-to-action and incorporate engaging fashion content that customers want. For the fashion industry, these could be style guides, fitting guides, or special opportunities to engage more with the brand. This technique brings in more people who one fine day will become buyers and generates quality leads for your marketing automation efforts. By providing exclusive content in exchange for customers subscribing to your newsletter or downloading a style guide is a great way to build a pipeline.
4) Problem: You are not sure if your fashion marketing tactics are working
Dreamweaver Solution:
The best method to quantify effective fashion marketing is track and analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs). For our fashion marketing clients,’ the KPIs may include metrics such as visitors to a particular landing page, number of likes, shares, and comments on Instagram or Facebook, influencer markereting campaign ROI, sales figures from a particular email campaign and so on.
At Dreamweaver Brand Communications we work with our fashion marketing clients and utilize marketing software that can help track and analyze the defined KPIs. We are then able to spot valuable marketing opportunities and leverage them, and also analyze the strengths and weaknesses and take appropriate action. We can track metrics in real time and can determine fashion marketing effectiveness simultaneously save time, money, and improving ROI.
5) Problem: Expecting immediate sales and results from long-term fashion marketing tactics
Dreamweaver Solution:
Many businesses, including fashion brands, expect a “magic marketing bullet” that will produce immediate results and increased sales. Some fashion businesses create a social media presence and start a company blog and are quickly disappointed that those efforts didn’t produce immediate boosts to their website traffic, leads, or an increase of social media followers. However, integrated marketing is meant to be organic; you are planting the seeds of brand integrity, customer trust, open and honest communication, and practical fashion advice. Over time, this seed will grow, compounding all of the integrated marketing efforts and your fashion brand will grow stronger: you will now have a core of loyal customers, which at Dreamweaver Brand Communications we call “Spheres of Influence” who are willing to organically share their posts and testimonials to spread your brand name all over the internet.
No seed, grows overnight, organic luxury PR and fashion marketing is by definition, a long-term plan.
